Essential FAX Software

Faxing and VOIP Info

VoIP in General

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology uses the Internet to route your phone calls. The "I" in VoIP stands for Internet. Because of this, they are able to offer lower costs or a flat rate for unlimited phone calls for their services.

Some well known VoIP services are: Vonage, Magicjack, Skype, Lingo, 8×8, Teleblend, RingCentral, BroadVoice, ooma, PhonePower, AT&T U-verse Voice, Comcast Digital Voic and others.

Unfortunately, for faxing, the line quality required is often not sufficient to maintain a fax connection.

A fax call has very specific audio signals that changes thousands of times per second. If any one of these signals is not received correctly, the fax will not go through. In a voice call, it is expected that even when your voice is not reproduced 100%, the other person will still understand you.

VOIP service varies greatly when it comes to faxing. It may work fine for your neighbor with the same service, but not for you. It may work for you only certain times of the day, or to certain phone numbers. It may work great for 6 months and then no faxes can be sent or received for the next 8 months.

Special Tips for Vonage

Some good tips for setting up Vonage for faxing include:

-dial *99 before faxing (this can be placed in your Dial Prefix field in the EssentialFax dialing rules,

-keep the transmission speed at 9600 or lower (item # 5 in Essentialfax Preferences).

Vonage also now offers a special VoIP Fax Line" that is optimized for faxing. (we have not tested this service, but it is claimed that it is more suitable for faxing than a regular Vonage line)

Technical Description

Signals from a fax is transmitted as analog sounds through a telephone line. When using a telephone service that route calls through the Internet or a digital telephone line, the sound signals must be converted to digital. The blue line in Figure 1 represents a true analog sound wave. When converted to digital, only an approximation of the sound wave can be reproduced. The green bars in Figure 1 shows the digital approximation. The difference between the analog and digital sound wave is shown in red. Because a true reproduction cannot be attained from analog to digital and then back from digital to analog, that is why faxing is unreliable through VoIP or digital telephone lines.

Figure 1

Additional reading:

- This is a bit of a technical article, but it contains some very good tips and information: Faxing over VoIP, the correct configuration settings that you need to make